John McCarthy

1927–2011 · American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

Topics: artificial intelligence, programming, life, mathematics

• He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

  — John McCarthy

• Whenever we write an axiom, a critic can say that the axiom is true only in a certain context. With a little ingenuity the critic can usually devise a more general context in which the precise form of the axiom doesn't hold. [...] There simply isn't a most general context.

  — John McCarthy

• When there's a will to fail, obstacles can be found.

  — John McCarthy

• It's difficult to be rigorous about whether a machine really 'knows', 'thinks', etc., because we're hard put to define these things. We understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming.

  — John McCarthy

• One can even conjecture that Lisp owes its survival specifically to the fact that its programs are lists, which everyone, including me, has regarded as a disadvantage.

  — John McCarthy